36 Comments

Your comment on the Christian reality dating show is simultaneously the funniest and saddest thing I have read this week.

Re: Monkey Waiters. I clicked on the link thinking that the story couldn’t possibly live up to the title. I was wrong. Look at that little guy go. Also, the pedant in me is heartened to see that they are, in fact, monkeys and not apes.

Wow. Just…wow. All I’m saying is: crows may be smart, but you don’t see them waiting tables.

Re: Geek library –

I’m not nerdy enough to really get a lot of what he’s got in there, but I definitely appreciate the hell out of it. Damned cool. Yet one more thing to be jealous about when I go home to my shoddy apartment :-P

Augh! Monkeys are taking jobs away from us! You know someone somewhere is reading this and wondering if they can teach monkeys to work a Frialator.

I guess I’m safe for now. I haven’t seen any stories about monkeys writing Java code. Y’know, you could do a scale of how complex a job is based on how many monkeys it takes to do it. Waiter = 1 monkey, Shakespeare = infinite number of monkeys. I figure my job’s somewhere in between.

Argh… I really hate these so-called “reality shows”. But maybe I just need to see something that appeals more to my interests… like say “Next Top Scientist” or “America’s Next Top NASA Administrator”. Each would need at least one “outrageous” candidate. Obviously, a Creationist would make waves in the Scientist show and The NASA Administrator program would demand at least one candidate who believes in UFOs and thinks NASA faked the moon landing. Comedy would thus ensue! And I would totally watch it.

Anyway, choosing appointees in a reality show format would doubtless have better results than leaving it up to George W. Bush.

regarding the artifacts of Jay Walker’s library, I have to unleash the marxist in myself here:

That kind of thing really aggrivates me. These are precious artifacts of science history and they are under the strict stewardship of a private collector. Sure it’s cool that he has an interest, but you know who else does? Way more people than him! Way more people that can’t see those amazing artifacts because it’s his private collection. That’s pretty damn sickening. To me’s little more than a tomb-raider: an eccentric thief compiling loads of artifact for his personal edification. “big affinity for the human imagination” indeed. Too bad he doesn’t have much of an affinity for his fellow humans. Sure he occasionally allows politicians, scholars and schoolchildren (awww) to see, but it’s still a private collection, in private hands, which leads me to my most important point:

A great archeologist once said, “It belongs in a museum!” I don’t know who said that. Maybe it was me. But that might have been a mylanta commercial.

Never mind for the moment that Wired magazine and its sycophantic techno puppets and plasticine people would gleefully bid farewell to culture and most everything that has brought the human species to what good it currently has (but that’s an altogether different story isn’t it), but I must say that I, being a Canadian skeptic, am with the other Canadian skeptic in that, at the very, very least, this stuff belongs, that’s right, belongs in the public domain.

A society and a world that enables any single individual to own so much stuff (whatever that stuff is, be it money, wealth, power, property, toys, whatever, does not matter), is just getting so tired, and so overdue for a regime change.

I’m sometimes quite naive and a bit thick, so for a while I had no idea what you meant by “trap.” However, I clearly see now that it could be construed that my comment was a troll to lure, um, Libertarians — is that right? — into a debate.

Well, I can assure you that was not my intent at all. Really, it wasn’t. I simply stated what I feel about any individual who amasses what I consider to be obscene amounts of wealth. That’s all.

So, even if you or “Shane” (shanek?) did, er, “bite” I would not respond, or attack, or come out from under the bridge, or whatever it is you are concerned I was planning.

@Im a Hedge: Absolutley not a trap. If I were trying to bait my libertarian friends I would have said “the government should legislate such so that certain artifacts, once being declared pieces of national culture, can never be allowed to be in the hands of a private collector” THAT would be baiting.

No, I just think that its incredibly greedy for one underserving person to hoarde such amazing artifacts. Undeserving because his only supposed merit is success in a dot.com business. It’s not like any of the artifacts were his or anything. It’s just some greedy eccentric who wishes to portray himself as one who loves the “immagination” of humanity, then devotes no doubt millions of dollars for his particular habit. Other rich people hoarde art. This guy hoardes science/tech artifacts. Both gross me out. I have no patience for rich people who love nothing more than to show everyone how rich they are, especially when it comes at the cost of….

anyway, I’m being redundant now. I said I wasn’t trying to bait, and I ended up saying loads that seem desigined to bait. I’ll bow out (for now).